Socialist Action Leader Denounces "Greedy" Teachers

In June, one Barry Weisleder, representing a group of Ontario substitute teachers (but sounding like a Bay Street CEO) made a splash in the media by excoriating teachers who continue to work after retiring. Weisleder, leader of the Socialist Action group, raged that “these teachers are not only flooding the market and keeping out fresh talent; they’re also draining the pension fund while earning money and not contributing to the plan any more…. There’s one word for this, and it’s greed. If your pension isn’t enough, then don’t retire” (Toronto Star, 24 June).

Using the capitalist “market” to pit underemployed workers against those struggling to supplement hard-won pensions by picking up extra hours, Weisleder’s diatribe comes straight from the playbook of the two-tier, divide-and-rule tactics the capitalists use to bust unions and destroy workers’ living standards.

This squeezed-lemon “socialist” is no stranger to class treason. From 2003 to 2006, after he was ousted from his post as president of the substitute teachers bargaining unit in the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, Weisleder dragged the union through the bosses’ courts, while demanding that his legal costs be paid for by a levy against union members! Calling on the bourgeois courts to intervene in the internal affairs of workers’ organizations only proves that, whatever lying “Marxist” rhetoric he may (infrequently) peddle, Weisleder views the capitalist state as an ally, not the sworn class enemy of the workers.

In 1996, Weisleder and his fellow union bureaucrats in the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) sought to shove a clawback contract down the throats of their staff workers, organized in the Ontario Public Service Staff Union (OPSSU). Weisleder, then an OPSEU executive board member, tried to muscle his way across an OPSSU picket line. The OPSSU official picket line publication Walk/Talk described how pickets “quickly surrounded Barry, shouting such messages as: Where are your principles? This is our work!” (“He talks like a socialist, but he walks kinda funny,” 6 September 1996). There’s one word for this, and it’s scab. Jack London once wrote that the scab is the lowest form of life; a scab who calls himself a socialist is lower still!

After the brief but powerful Toronto transit workers strike in April was broken by the Ontario government with the NDP’s full backing, a letter by Weisleder, now in his “NDP Socialist Caucus Co-chair” hat, appeared on the Toronto Star website (28 April). Covering up the NDP’s criminal role, Weisleder advised the capitalist powers-that-be: “As for making the TTC an essential service, removal of the right to strike is a fool’s paradise. It would diminish democratic rights for everyone, reward management arrogance and still not guarantee labour peace.”

The quest for “labour peace” perfectly captures the essence of social democracy, which Leon Trotsky described as “the acceptance of reformist oppositional activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.”

Scabbing, suing the union, denouncing “greedy” teachers, preaching “labour peace”: the gross anti-working-class antics of SA’s Canadian leader tell you everything you need to know about this group. Worse than remote from the kind of class-struggle leadership needed by workers, they stand exposed as its die-hard opponents.